What the fastest possible x64 emulation way of OS4 today ?

@All
I need to build as fast as possible emulation of amigaos4 for the x86 platform (better if it is for win64/win10). As far as i know, we have just 2 solutions: WinUAE with emulation of the classic machine so blizzardppc and/or cyberstromppc , and QEMU with emulation of SAM460 (as far as i know, pegasos2 emulation is still WIP).

I tried QEMU half of a year ago, and it was pretty buggy in comparison with even winuae (i.e. on the level of installation, just some bits do not works, like SFS partition can't be seen, etc). Is it anyhow changes?

If the solution is winuae only, are there some tricks, which will make it as fast as possible? Maybe some specific video board emulation and not Zorro3 Picasso anymore? Or maybe some specific options check/uncheck so to make it be faster as possible? The look not that matter, matter faster boot, and fast enough emulation of usual things.

@kas1e

I guess emulation can be accelerated by allowing native x86 code, snippets. Code can be replaced at boot with patches.

@LiveForIt
I didn't mean theoretical moments, there are plenty of things that can be done. I am about what we have now, and how to set up maximum from current emulators.

@kas1e
Starting with WinUAE 3.6.1 I got pretty high performance (PicassoIV emulation) and nice overall emulation (prior versions had sound issues for me).
It ran my ported and optimized Tower57 at almost the same fps as the original native x86 version on the same machine, LOL :D
However, Compositing was very slow (maybe that was improved in the meantime).
BGR24 screen-modes were much faster than anything else. Hicolor screen-modes were particularly slow.
Other than that I don't remember any pitfalls.
I still have the UAE config file but unfortunately deleted the virtual HDD so I cannot give it a try with a newer UAE right now.
I'll mail you the config, should be a good starting point.

@kas1e
You are right that qemu is slow. The HD image you created what kind of format did you use? qcow2/raw? I have a feeling that raw is faster, but it remains for me to test it.

A better graphics card support on qemu would make a big impact, I guess.

@kas1e

I run WinUAE 4.2.1 on an Intel Core i5 2.4GHz / 16GB RAM laptop, and I can say the system feels at least as fast as my Sam 440ep-Flex.

@Daniel
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Thanks! Got your mail!

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But it's only 4mb of video memory, right? Or is that enough for tests anyway? As far as i understand it can't even handle 1920x1080x24 then because of too low video memory?

@George
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Can't remember for now if it was qcow2/raw... But if you say that raw one feels faster, then will check raw one later too as well.

@Trixie
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I emulate a4000/cpcc + 128mb z3 fast + UAE [Zorro III] 512MB. And things are not very fast on my 2.5ghz icore.. I even can see how screen mode prefs redraws ..

@kas1e

Hi kas1e,

The user "White" on MorphZone managed to make WinUAE running AmigaOS 4.1 incredibly fast, but all his videos on YouTube are unfortunately gone.

I saw him post recently on MorphZone, so maybe you can ask him there or send a PM?

https://morph.zone/news/

He did all kinds of crazy stuff on 4.1 which I thought wouldn't be possible with emulation.

As for myself, I used FlowerPot to set everything up and Workbench feels nice and smooth. It is of course worse when it comes to running games and demanding applications though. Please let me know if you want to me to send you my config.

Cheers!

You can use UAEGFX. No need for PicassoIV. Just make a clone of DEVS:Monitors/PicassoIV(.info) as UAEGFX then change the tooltype to BOARDTYPE=uaegfx

Then set the RTG board to UAE Zorro III

And don't forget NORAMPAGER option for C:BootLoader if you want to increase RAM.

And uaehf.device & uaenet.device works.

I do notice that sometimes my particular setup can freeze, but I haven't bothered tracking down the cause yet.

@MickJT

Please make sure you have the latest (1.35) PatchCompositeTags installed. http://os4depot.net/?function=showfil ... sc/patchcompositetags.lha

I had some freezes until I realized I was using an old version. Could be one explanation.

Hi,
and a lot that I didn't write,
I just wanted to say that the device to choose is:
cyberstormppc and not uaehf.device
also in "ram z3mapping mode" you have to choose "real" and not "automatic" ( avoid many crashes )
these two options alone increase system performance with winuae by over 100%.
On the contrary, if you do not choose the performance it degrades by more than 100%

If it helps, I can leave my configuration file

I also add that in RTG Board (winuae panel)
you have to choose:
8bit *
15 / 16bit
24bit
R8G8B8A8
(only after configuring uaegfx will the colors be offset otherwise)

select G-REX + ES1370 PCI instead everyone chooses MEDIATOR as well as being more efficient it allows you to allocate more memory and the sound is cleaner.
(use the floppy included in the amigaos 4.1 Final CD for the firmware at the first installation boot).

And the emulation speed increases (you will notice this only using applications and not just doing a system installation but using it in practice with many applications.

If possible select Wasapi EX this improves a lot of things
If you use a capture program to make your videos instead, select Wasapi Default.

select winuae RTG Board "hardware sprite emulation"
you will immediately see for example "Quake" you will see perfectly for example without any artifact.
If you always disable it with Quake you will see the artifacts on the screen.

All of these tweaks will make emulation better even if there are other tweaks in all emulation to do.

But this is a good place to start.

"If after working on a virtual .hdf the system satisfies you.
then you can still increase the speed more by using a real hard drive even ssd.
This increases the speed of copying files exponially.
normal hard drive more than double compared to an .hdf
ssd drive 6-8 times faster than a normal hard drive

use "x76 hide" to initialize the hard disk with specific tools like
"acronis diskdirector"
at that point winuae will recognize the hard disk without problems.
And you can initialize the hard disk directly with "hdtoolbox"

one important thing for this step (real hard drives only)
is to use "uaehf.device"
otherwise you won't be able to initialize it the first time.
Later you can mount it as "cyberstormppc.device"
you just need to save the changes with "hdtoolbox" by choosing "cyberstormppc.device".
At that point the real hard drive will always be seen regularly with "cyberstormppc.device" on every boot."

"With the "hide" option windows will not interfere when you use the real hard disk.
otherwise it will always try to initialize it and conflict with winuae."


this step will give compatibility with most programs and only in some cases "patchcompositetags" will be used

obviously all that I have learned in my experience with 4.1FE I owe it to this forum that I thank again and its users.

But unfortunately in emulation some things deviate from the real hardware.

And they must be adapted but then in the end nothing particular.

here is a small video I recently made with AmiTube 0.7
you can see the running speed.

https://we.tl/t-3PV3VRQ2cK

Thanks again to everyone, for the precious suggestions you have always given me.

@kas1e

To emulate OS4 under x64 we have two choices: WinUAE for windows users or UAE/QUEMU for linux users.

UAE/WinUAE are based on an old version of QEMU engine, PPC emulation was added as plugin.
You can emulate an Amiga classic with a PPC expansion board and it's fully compatible with OS4.1fe
You can archive a good speed on gfx side setting UAEGFX as board, but it's ok also with Picasso IV board, but in this case you are limited with 4mb ram to 32bit hd resolutions.
Cpu/fpu emulation has some little bugs, all fixed in latest QEMU releases. Sadly both Toni and Frode, as stated on some EAB posts, aren't interested in a new QEMU plugin version and considers OS4 compatibility as a "side effect" adding powerpc board emulation.
So OS4 compatibility is remained without any active support.

On QEMU side we have Sam460ex and Pegasos II boards emulation, but we have more severe limitations because some motherboard features aren't still implemented.
So you have a limited GFX card compatibility and graphics speed is very poor.
Instead CPU/FPU are well emulated and speed is quite good and has no bugs in powerpc instruction emulation.

So to improve/develop further OS4 emulation we need:
for UAE/WinUAE a new plugin version based on latest QEMU sources
for Sam460ex/Pegasos II board a better gfx implementation with also 3d support.

Sadly QEMU project is really hard and complex!
It's not an easy task and to emulate an expansion board like a gfx card or a sound card you should know all it's chipset internals.
There's an active project to emulate a radeon board but it's still incomplete due lack of chip documentation.

https://osdn.net/projects/qmiga/wiki/SubprojectAti
https://osdn.net/projects/qmiga/wiki/SubprojectPegasos2
http://zero.eik.bme.hu/~balaton/qemu/amiga/

@All
Did anyone use for now Wine with the latest WinUAE and AOS4 on it?

@All
Is anyone there use FS-UAE ? I found it is being pretty much faster than WinUAE (maybe because of simpler configs, dunno). I have just 20 seconds from start till fully usable OS, instead of 27 seconds with winuae. But with FSUAE i have other questions:


1. Is only picassoIV can be used with fs-UAE and so be limited to 1280x720x24 for os4? Nothing like winuae.gfx /etc ?

2. Are shared directories work with fsuae with os4? I mean can i share some dir, and so be able easy to work with the emulator? Or maybe there are some other ways how i can send files in a fast manner?

3. Is there any option to auto-resize the window to the size of the screen mode in the workbench? Because as it is now by default, my window opens in something like 940xsomething while screen mode size is 1280x720, so I had to use window_width=1280 and window_height=720 in config.

@kas1e

I use FS-UAE.

1.) FS-UAE 3 only supports Picasso IV. FS-UAE Version 4 (only git Releases right now) should support UAEGFX, because of the support for "UAE Expansions". However i tried it one time and only got GFX garbage, even when using a Picasso IV. So i went back to 3.1.66 for now.

Using a Picasso IV you can use resolutions a bit higher than 1280x720. 1280x800@24 and 1440x900@256 Colors works too. 1440x900@256 is absolutely fine for coding, DEBUGGING and other stuff like that. For 256 Colors i recommend the "Low Color" Theme or some comparable Theme to avoid ugly dithering.

2.) Directory hard disks should work using FS-UAE Version 4

You can download Version 4 builds here.

3.) I also were looking for an option like that. However i decided to launch FS-UAE in Fullscreen.

@IamSONIC
Oh, so, at least vesion4 can be the same, but able to use directories hard disk. Will check this out, thanks for anwer

@IamSONIC
Tested the latest beta version. For first what i find, it's starting now the same slower as winuae : 30 seconds on my setup. Version 3.x (with probably older Winuae code), starts in 20 seconds.

Also, the same config/the same system.hdf just didn't work and produced white rectangles on boot.

So probably too much beta.


@All
Is it known if the latest PPC code of QEMU is faster/better than the current one in WinUAE's plugin? Why i ask, that while it may be that they fixed some more bugs in CPU/FPU, but what about speed ? Did anyone make any tests? Just maybe it not worth to update ppc plugin at all.

@kas1e

I tried FS-UAE Version 4 one more time. No luck using UAEGFX at all. Tried options like "uaeboard=full+indirect" and so on... doesn't work.

However it works using the Picasso IV. You need to save 640x480@24 as resolution using FS-UAE Version 3. Then you can boot without GFX garbage to workbench using FS-UAE Version 4. After OS4 has been booted you can change the resolution to 800x600, or 1024x768. Unfortunately when i tried to use a Widescreen Resolution the picture gets ugly again, because of those Bezels on the left and right. Tried disabling them. Couldn't get rid of them. But for some performance Tests FS-UAE Version 4 could be used now.

@kas1e
I have prepared a video for you with qemu 6.2.0
where you can see sam460ex 4.1 with all updates including update1 and 2.

I don't know what tests you intend to take (question)?

The test was carried out with a Ryzen 5800x with "qemu host linux"
I had done these tests with an intel I5 2400 and I don't notice big differences, this is a sign that the quality of qemu is good.
Obviously there is no graphics card support.

You can also work by mounting a usb-data stick directly using it in 4.1 qemu mounts it without problems.
So you can move the data you need in seconds.

If you need more details, I'm happy to answer you.
Because the procedure is particular especially for the 4.1FE amigaos cd once the system is installed
qemu does not recognize the -cdrom option as a second device with sam460ex.

Also currently I was modifying the ISO of 4.1 on a "personal only" basis to make it compatible with sm501 with pegasos2 the experiment was successful.
Without going into details
But qemu should be modified for this purpose
But to do this in depth and also to support PicassoIV it takes someone who knows very well amigaos 4.1 at least to modify the ISO and load the right modules at least to do the first tests.

Here I made you a short video:
in 7 days usually the site hosting it deletes it.

https://we.tl/t-lYmpIQcbNQ

part note:
the audio is heard perfectly
i used a software to capture the video
this is why I don't hear it

@white
QEMU with sam460 looks a bit slower than winuae/fs-UAE with classic PPC Amigas.. While more or less ok on your CPU, it still looks about the same as on my notebook with icore i5 3.1ghz with winuae, and even slower if on the same notebook but with fs-uae.

Is KVM works for sam460 emulation? I mean if i just got an old G5 Macintosh, can i KVM emulation of sam460?

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Were you able to boot it with modified ISO if I understand correctly? And if so, how good is emulated in comparison with Sam460? Is KVM works for it?


Another thing that i want to know if the PPC emulation code in the latest QEMU is better and not slower than that one used in winuae/fsuae PPC plugin? I just have the ability to make the latest qemu PPC code fits into the ppc-plugin for winuae, but i need to know if it is faster/slower/better..